Society isn’t the product of brute strength.  It emerges from cooperation, and cooperation depends on ideas.  Ideas shape how men act toward one another.  They’re not isolated sparks in a lone mind, but living forces that spread only through exchange.  A castaway on an island may think, but without others his ideas can’t transform into society.  It’s only when shared, debated, and lived out that ideas become the foundation of civilization.

Force alone can’t create this.  It can break bones, silence dissent, or instill fear, but it can’t generate cooperation.  Even the harshest rulers lean on belief.  Their edicts only persist because people accept them, however reluctantly.  A decree is just words on paper until minds accept the command as binding.  Passive resignation isn’t a victory of force, but a victory of ideas—the idea that obedience is required.

Every action, whether in agreement or in opposition, is guided by thought.  A man who obeys a foolish law has still reasoned, however dimly, that obedience outweighs rebellion.  The soldier who marches at the tyrant’s order has not abandoned ideas—he has adopted the idea that disobedience is worse.  Even tacit acceptance is acceptance.  It reveals the real lever of power: the ruling ideas within the minds of men.

This is why tyrants can never rest on violence alone.  Violence is short-lived, exhausting, and unsustainable.  A vast population can’t be subdued forever by a small minority with weapons.  The minority must secure ideological support.  They must convince some to act as enforcers, and the rest to submit.  Armies, police, bureaucrats—these aren’t mere instruments of force.  They’re believers, each one accepting that their duty is to obey and impose.  Without this ideological support, the tyrant’s apparatus collapses under its own weight.

Everywhere and always, leaders are few.  The ruled are many.  The balance can only be maintained when the many accept the legitimacy of the few.  The tyrant’s survival depends on the conviction of the population that his rule is either necessary or inevitable.  The moment that conviction fades, the moment obedience is no longer believed to be right, the tyrant stands exposed as a weak man with no more power than his small circle of enforcers.  The yoke is thrown off not by swords, but by minds breaking free from the idea of submission.

History turns not on brute force, but on the rise and fall of beliefs.  Chains endure only when they are believed to be unbreakable.  Freedom appears only when men believe in freedom.  The tyrant imagines he rules by decree, but in reality he rules only because his subjects agree—silently or loudly—that he does.  In the end, it’s not the ruler who governs.  It’s the ideas his subjects have accepted.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Human Action